ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Ma Xiaojun <damage3025@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Disclaimer: I actually care desktop more than mobile.
But this list seems to be more popular than ubuntu-desktop.

The situation for mobile seems to be that we will use Maliit. I'm
using N9 and vanilla OS so I'm using Maliit everyday. I'd say it's
decent. But the engines Nokia wrote at that time may not be FOSS. I
wonder whether anyone has seriously evaluated the CJKV input UX for
Ubuntu Phone. I guess I can offer some help here.

The situation for desktop, which I'm more familiar with, is not very
good. In desktop we use IBus. Both IBus upstream and LP has many
unresolved bugs. Despite some reasonable feature requests, there are
many corner cases like IBus block Minecraft input (no one has a idea
yet, unless we believe Minecraft has bug) .
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ibus/+bugs
http://code.google.com/p/ibus/issues/list
http://code.google.com/p/ibus/issues/detail?id=1539

And we are behind IBus upstream for one major release. Upstream has
1.5.x while we have 1.4.x. It is the case for a reason, as 1.5.x is
only qualified enough for Arch and Fedora. Debian, openSUSE and us all
rejected 1.5.x version. However, not having 1.5.x give us very dated
IBus engines.

It should be note that the indicator for IBus is half broken.
"Embedded in menu" is not functional at all. Switching between IMs may
not always be successful.

Fortunately, IBus 1.5.x seems getting better recently, some bug fixes
are committed. I personally hope that 13.10 can land 1.5.x , have
better indicator and I'd like to engage in this process.

However, it also depends on what we are going to have in 14.04 LTS and
Ubuntu Phone. How would Mir go. To what level we are going to have
desktop and mobile as single platform. If desktop will also use
Maliit, it may be more wise to write Maliit engines now. If IBus is
still the choice, then we should do things earlier and make sure that
the final CJKV input UX to end users is not as broken as 12.04 LTS.

Regards,